Sch?nberg remained a teaching auto-didact his whole life. Especially in phases of aggressive innovation, his circle of students created a support for him against the attacks of traditionally oriented friends of music, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Los Angeles. Thus, the Viennese School ? which should not be prefaced by “Second,” since at the time of Viennese Classicism there was no “First” ? became the leading example of a compositional school of modernism.

Sch?nberg became the leading example of a century, however, through the fact that his artistic development, surprisingly logical and generative, marked fundamental paradigms of modernist compositional procedures: progress from tradition, freedom of expression, classical modernism.

“Progress from tradition” determined Sch?nberg?s early compositional development. He rejected age-old oppositions like the antagonism between Brahms and Wagner or between absolute instrumental music and musical drama. Tired antinomies like those between absolute and programme music he also ignored, in that he placed no constraints on the expressive possibilities of vocal and subject-oriented instrumental music. Stemming from the tradition of German Romanticism, his early songs are simultaneously autonomous and textually based. Also the string sextet “Verkl?rte Nacht” is completely independent in form, yet bases its musical narrative on Richard Dehmel?s poem of the same name. Similarly, the symphonic poem “Pelleas und Melisande” is instrumental music supported by a programme. Generic musical categories provide a conceptual support, a foundation for possible connections, and an angle for certain negations, but no longer a basis for the conventional composition of a generic work. With Sch?nberg the singular status of the individual work as telos of musical modernity is confirmed.

The “Gurre-Lieder,” a masterwork lyrically founded in a turn-of-the-century musical world view, integrated the cantabile, Brahmsian, strophic songs with the expanded orchestral language of Wagner, and secured Sch?nberg?s reputation as a composer striding away from tradition. The triumphal premi?re of this work, under the direction of Franz Schreker on 23 February 1913 in Vienna, brought to a temporary silence all those critics who had for the past few years battled his steps toward an expressionist New Music ? accomplished and spectacularly demonstrated with “Pierrot lunaire” ? calling it a result of compositional incompetence or even impotence.

With the works composed between 1907 and 1913, Sch?nberg entered music history. They mark the source documents of that which since then ? with varying meanings ? has been called “New Music.” With the First and Second String Quartets, the Chamber Symphony, the song cycle on Stefan George?s “Das Buch der h?ngenden G?rten,” with piano and orchestral works, the melodrama “Pierrot lunaire,” as well as the stage works “Erwartung” and “Die gl?ckliche Hand,” a group of works emerge in quick succession that force a decision: “critical works” at a crossroads. A compositional process that proceeded lightening fast at times, then again stopped for awhile altogether, remained characteristic for Sch?nberg from then on. These works made him, whom his students honored in 1912 with an celebratory volume, one of the ? indeed the ? protagonist of musical modernism.

Scandals litter the performance history, scars of a new imagination that perceives the conventions of received tonal language as chains, and which gradually recede as the classicism of the works sinks into public consciousness. For example, the premi?re of the Second String Quartet (on 21 December 1908 in Vienna with the Ros? Quartet and soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder) led to open fighting; although the work is tonal, unrest was incited by the “Augustin” quote in the Scherzo and the added vocal part of the two last movements, unprecedented in the string quartet genre. In order to avoid such scandals, which Sch?nberg felt were completely foreign to his art, he and his students founded the legendary but short-lived “Society for Private Musical Performances,” to which Zemlinsky added a branch in Prague. The scandal, a result of New Art in confrontation with a public expecting something less radical, and the retreat to a circumscribed, close-knit circle of “initiated,” are determining factors of New Music in general, verifying Sch?nberg?s paradigmatic position also in this regard.

In music history his name is associated with two epic “inventions”: the renunciation of tonal composition in the wake of the “emancipation of the dissonance” in expressionist atonality around 1910, and, a dozen years later, the development of “composition with twelve notes related only to each other” (i.e. not based on a common tonic note), 12-tone music or dodecaphony. These compositional innovations are certified by works of the highest rank, their possibilities having been artistically proven beyond all theory and explicit poetics. That 20th-century music historiography has now also recognized the epochal break before the First World War in the works of Igor Stravinsky, B?la Bart?k or Charles Ives, which for some time has gone beyond Adorno?s dichotomy expressed in his “Philosophy of New Music” (whose author believed he could elevate Sch?nberg?s rank by disparaging his colleagues, especially Stravinsky), lends Sch?nberg?s contribution to music history additional historical weight.

“Freedom of expression”: Insofar as Sch?nberg acknowledged (on the occasion of the premi?re of his George song cycle op. 15 in January 1910), that he was conscious in this work of “having broken through all boundaries of a by-gone aesthetic,” and in his compositional process followed instead of received rules his own inner voice, an instance of what Ernst Bloch has described as “logic of expression,” he set a standard whose historical influence ? beyond stylistic criteria ? reaches to the present day, namely Wolfgang Rihm. In fact, to the degree that New Music emancipates itself from rules and opens itself to a language of freedom, successful composition becomes more difficult. Even if in its expressionist syntax the gesture still draws upon elements of tonal music ? as in the third Piano Piece from op. 11 (composed in August 1909) that lays one concentrated means of expression upon another ?, and even if every Sch?nberg work displays in its musical shape more traces of conventional forms than those ensemble compositions by Edgard Var?se from the ?20s, still Adorno?s emphatic thesis conceived around 1960 ? the idea that a truly free, artistic expression, realized in ever-newer forms of New Music, is rooted in Sch?nberg?s expressionist-atonal works from the “heroic” period before the First World War ? has justified Sch?nberg?s position as a leading intellectual figure of modernism. Creations such as the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16 (for a time provided with the title “Colors”), informed by the idea of tone-color melody (“Klangfarbenmelodie”) explained at the end of his “Theory of Harmony,” or the variously individualized ensemble arrangements in “Pierrot lunaire” are strides whose historical significance for music history up to the present day cannot be underestimated. The avant-garde aural art since the 1960s and the concrete aural innovations of the newly assembled ensembles, which have replaced the clumsy standard ensembles, stem from these originating documents within Sch?nberg?s ?uvre.

The expressionist musical style, however, found itself faced with two alternatives: the works either tended to be temporally contracted, very short pieces (Sch?nberg wondered at the “concentration” of the string quartet Bagatelles op. 9 of his student Anton Webern, who was able “to express a novel through a single gesture, happiness through a single breath”) or needed the guiding support of a poetic text “along which” the music could make its way. This situation drove Sch?nberg, after years of hesitation and trial, finally to “12-tone music.” In a syntactic sense, the pattern of a polyphonic regulated movement was revived; musical shape was reactivated in formally older levels that expressionism had thrown overboard. Thus in the mid-?1920s Sch?nberg developed ? here also corresponding to tendencies in Stravinsky or Hindemith ? a “classical modernism.”

With this third paradigm Sch?nberg made clear that a conscious return to models of earlier music ? whether it be genres, formal types, movement models, or expressive characteristics ? offered a viable possibility under the conditions of modernism, one that should not be excluded from an ostensibly important, one-dimensional progress. As forcefully as the 20th century nears its end under the sign of a “postmodern” art of censure, the relevance of this paradigm also becomes all the more clear. Pierre Boulez? critique of the ill-proportioned modernist position held by the classic Sch?nbergian 12-tone works ? the Piano Suite op. 25 (which returns to dance movements of the early 18th century) or the sonata forms of the Wind Quintet or the Third String Quartet (which carry on the instrumental forms of Beethoven and Brahms) ? is motivated out of interest in the same issue. Today, since we have learned to live with extreme disjunctions, with simultaneous discrepancies and crass contradictions within the work itself and to value such findings positively as aesthetic challenges, we no longer need to adhere to such critique. On the contrary, also in this third paradigm we can recognize more clearly than ever before perspectives for the further compositional history of the 20th century: precisely in the postmodern age, in which “music about music” has become the rule, it exudes a unique power of fascination.

Another point: Sch?nberg also set the standard for the relationship between autonomous and politically engaged music. To be sure, he held fast to the supreme primacy of the autonomous aesthetic throughout his life, and yet he found in works from all periods ? conveyed through writings, programmes, etc. ? a motivation for the artistic importance of the content. For polemic clothed as work he made just as much a place in his Three Satires op. 28 as he did later for political protest and religious lament and accusation. In exile, where he further expanded his spectrum of instrumental genres ? with a violin concerto and a piano concerto ? he simultaneously defined his music in a specific sense as “engaged” ? for the religious-political goals of Judaism as well as against Nazi Germany. In his “Ode to Napoleon” (after Byron) or “A Survivor from Warsaw” a complex, modern musical language represents something distinctive in an absolute sense and formulates it into an individual shape. Because of this range that sees no contradiction between absolute and politically engaged works, for neither allows any aspirations to art other than the highest, Sch?nberg became a model during his lifetime and later for many composers, whether Pierre Boulez (whose “Le Marteau sans ma?tre” is linked to “Pierrot lunaire”) or Luigi Nono, whose politically engaged music (such as “Il canto sospeso” or “Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz”) inherited and transformed Sch?nberg?s engagement.

Finally, Sch?nberg is a portrait of the 20th century in the pattern of his life as well. The National Socialist catastrophe drove Jews and modern composers, like countless other artists, into American exile, an exile that was soon no longer experienced as such, for new perspectives were opened to Sch?nberg that once again enriched his creativity. Through this migration, the emphasis of modern musical culture shifted from Europe to America. The European tragedy, resulting from misguided human and political developments, increased the value of American cultural life; in the second half of the century a world-wide institution of “New Music” arose from these roots. All the more reason Europe, Austria, and especially Vienna, Sch?nberg?s home, may now rejoice that at the end of the 20th century, with the legacy of Arnold Sch?nberg, the sources of his work and life return to the place of their origin ? for the benefit of all friends of this epoch-making composer?s music ? in a transfer that simultaneously strengthens the commemoration of the inestimable contribution of Vienna to the culture of modernism around 1900.

? Arnold Schönberg Center und Hermann Danuser, 1998